1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to modalities in a computer appliance, and more specifically, to an apparatus and a method for changing modalities of a home theater computer appliance.
2. Description of the Related Art
Remarkable improvements in computer hardware price/performance ratios during the last decade have caused major shifts in both home and office computing environments. Spiraling advances in semiconductor technology have enabled the appearance of personal computers with the computing power equivalent to supercomputers available a decade ago. Further, the advent of high performance audio and graphics sub-system has turned the personal computer into a multimedia device capable of saturating the user's audio-visual senses.
Along with the growth of computer usage, a new publishing medium called a World-Wide Web has gained rapid acceptance world wide. The World-Wide Web (WWW) is a system of documents and multimedia files that can be retrieved and viewed by any person who has access to the Internet. Originally developed as a network to facilitate communications among military and scientific research users, the Internet has since been expanded beyond its original defense orientation and is now being used world wide for a variety of commercial purposes.
The Internet proved to be a remarkable way for people to communicate and share information. However, in its native form, the interface of the Internet is so nonintuitive that only computer specialists could navigate the Internet. To overcome this problem, the World-Wide Web (WWW) is distributed across thousands of host computers attached into the system's communications network. The World-Wide Web is simply a series of communications of protocols representative of information in documents that could be linked to other documents and stored on computers throughout the Internet. Users of the Internet can access documents or pages via a program called a browser. Although early browsers were text-only, today's browsers offer windows-based icons, pull-down menus, bit-map graphics and colorful links to display hyper-text documents. Furthermore, the Web standard presents a system independent graphical user interface for users.
Due to its ability to tie together many disparate sources and its unified, easy to access user interface, the World-Wide Web is rapidly gaining acceptance as an information delivery media. The accessibility of audio and image files such as video over the World-Wide Web is also enabling the Internet to become a central repository suitable for entertainment as well. Hence, the collision between the Internet, the computer industry and the communications industry has resulted in the development of new appliances which satisfy computing, information gathering and entertainment needs of users. Thus, the graphical Web browser supports an information revolution and a cultural phenomenon.
In a related trend, the television (TV) industry has also been positively affected by advances in semiconductor technology. As TV sets are migrating from the older analog technology to digital technology, new features have been added that previously would have been impractical or cost prohibitive to implement. As digital TVs become mainstream, TV viewing is beginning to shift from a passive to an active experience. Applications such as home shopping, home banking, video-on-demand, and remote education have added to the utility of the ubiquitous TV sets. With digital set-top boxes and digital TVs, the difference between a computer and a TV starts to diminish.
The popularity of the Internet, coupled with the advent of digital TV sets, has accelerated the convergence of the computer and the TV industries. The TV-PC convergence is leading to products that share attributes of both the computer and the television unit so that Internet access, word processing, gaming, and TV watching are integrated into one unit. Although the convergence of the computer industry and the communications industry offers consolidated services which significantly improve the productivity and convenience for many users, to date, Internet capable devices have offered inconsistent and complex interfaces in communicating with users.
The problem arises as each device now has to provide multiple personalities or functionalities which had previously been provided in separate devices. The inconsistency of the user interface in these appliances often leaves the user with a less than satisfying experience, for these users are typically not technically oriented and demand dynamic products and services that adapt to their lifestyles rather than forcing them to adapt their lives to fit the needs of the device. As users want consistency and flexibility in the use of mobile devices, what the users require are devices that provide a consistent "look and feel" experience independent of the underlying application mode that the device is currently running. Thus, a need exists for a consistent, yet intuitive interface supporting a plurality of modalities to allow users the ability to easily switch amongst the different modes of the appliance and yet still retain the familiar graphical user interface available in current computers.